One of the most annoying questions you can ask an artist is: “How long did this take to make?” Stacy Phillips’ solo exhibit at Trove Gallery, opening Dec. 30, demonstrates the long gestation time it takes to bring creative ideas to life. In fact, it provides a glimpse into the nonlinear way an artist can,...

The Gallery at Library Square boasts a unique perspective, allowing its audience to peer from its tidy enclosure over the fourth floor railing and into the towering abyss of the library’s atrium. Yet so quick are we to become inured to experience that this once acrophobia-inducing encounter has, for most of us, long since ceased...

Attending two performances addressing themes of gender, sexuality, race, and power in Salt Lake City over the same weekend in November was disorienting. UMOCA’s When Flesh Becomes Matter: Bodies Unbounded, by choreographer Yasin (Ya-Ya) Fairley, and the University of Utah School of Dance’s Gender/Power, by Maya Ciarrocchi and Kris Grey alongside U of U students,...

Not all artists see the same. The difference between the way a novice sees a scene and how a seasoned artist views it can be great, and can be the key between a good painting experience and a frustrating one. The serious student artist needs to see in a new way. This new way of...

At a private event in his Woodland Hills home this past month, J. Kirk Richards unveiled his newest body of art, including 2-D and 3-D work, further establishing his reputation as an impressive artist able to create works that speak both to a local, religious audience as well as to a broader art-loving public ....

This past September, after I came home from a weeklong river trip, a friend told me I needed to read Alex Caldiero’s new book, Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance (Saltfront, 2016). The book is a facsimile of a poetic journal Caldiero kept on a six-day trip on the Colorado River through Cataract...

Sometime in the 1980s, art world observers began to notice that artists were often among the first entrepreneurs to move into neighborhoods widely considered uninhabitable, where they would jump-start what soon became the gentrification process. It would have been in large, coastal American cities’ industrial and warehouse areas that this phenomenon first received predominantly negative...

The windows of the Canyon Community Center in Springdale, which is cradled in a redrock canyon just outside Zion National Park, look out on a landscape that visually reverberates with the abstracted canyons and flora on display within. In a hand-in-glove match between venue and artwork, the Center hosts the exhibit Lines in Nature:...

Exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art this month, the traditionally trained painter Ben Steele chooses subjects that hark back to a universal and nostalgic American childhood. From Kennewick, Washington, and educated first at the University of Utah and then at the apprenticeship program in Helper—under the instruction of artists David Dornan and Paul Davis—Steele’s Western...

From mysterious murals deep inside Paleolithic caves, to movable adornment for Renaissance merchants, art is something malleable, reflective of the space and time in which it exists. Art was one thing when it was made for the magnificent churches of Venice, like San Marco and San Lorenzo, and became another when it was created for...

SUNDAY BLOG READ is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah’s literary writers. 15 Bytes regularly offers works-in-progress and / or recently published work by some of the state’s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today we present Jan C. Minich, who divides his time between Wellington,...

I typically leave Repertory Dance Theatre performances feeling satisfied by an evening of enjoyable, well-crafted dances, and Thursday night’s Brio program was no exception. Brio features five works by Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith. Several creations were by both members of the choreographic duo; others were created by Smith, who continues to choreograph following Shapiro’s...

Some titles, like Many Things Have Happened Since He Died by Elizabeth Dewberry and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, have made me want to read a novel when I know nothing at all about the author and haven’t read a review. The title itself creates a sort of tension that seems...

On Saturday at Kingsbury Hall, Utah Presents hosted an evening with Ragamala Dance Company. Directed by the mother-daughter team Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the internationally touring company holds a venerable reputation as purveyors of the traditional Indian form, Bharatanatyam. During a time where the world is brimming over with unrest and antipathy, the evening...